This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As new generations of handsets and other wireless communication devices become smaller and embedded with more and more applications, new antenna designs will be needed to provide solutions to inherent limitations of these devices. With classical antenna structures, a certain physical volume is required to produce a resonant antenna structure at a particular radio frequency and with a particular bandwidth. In multi-band applications, more than one such resonant antenna structure may be required. With the advent of a new generation of wireless devices, such classical antenna structure will need to take into account beam switching, beam steering, space or polarization antenna diversity, impedance matching, frequency switching, mode switching, etc., in order to reduce the size of devices and improve their performance.
In addition, it is at least in part, the physical structure and/or configuration of the new antenna designs that provides the functionality described above. In contrast to, for example, software-based inventions, where actual software code can be protected and/or hidden, the physical structures and/or configurations can easily be identified, studied, and replicated simply by disassembling or x-raying a wireless communication device in which an antenna is embedded. With increasing numbers of electronic device and component manufacturers, the risk of unauthorized copying/reverse-engineering of electronic components, such as these new antenna designs also increases. Therefore, there is a need for electronic components, such as antennas which can be configured to have certain desired properties while at the same time making it difficult or altogether impossible to reverse-engineer and copy.